The Woman Who Walked into Doors
By Roddy Doyle
Jonathan Cape. $29.95
Reviewed by Dave Riley
I first read a novel by Roddy Doyle soon after the film version of The Commitments was released. Since then I've kept up with what this Irish author has to offer. Reading Roddy Doyle is an activity I wholeheartedly recommend to anyone.
Unfortunately, there is this perception that Irish denotes a certain Celtic earthiness, boozy and bawdy, which celebrates life from the inside of a Dublin pub. So pervasive is this perception that the great comic writer, Flann O'Brien, could spend a lifetime at the typewriter sending up such Irishry. Nonetheless, thanks to the likes of Mr J. Joyce, such archetypical fictions persist in the imagination.
Doyle, in contrast, comes as something of a shock. While the comic fancy remains and prospers, his stories are set in a raw wasteland that is brutal and mean. Ordinary Irish life — despite our penchant to dress it up in emerald green fantasy — is just as coarse and unrelenting as our own. Take away their accents, and his characters are universal.
Since completing his Barrytown trilogy (The Commitments, The Snapper and The Van), Doyle has switched from dialogue-driven novels on youth and family life in depressed working-class Dublin to directly addressing his readers in the language of two extraordinary creations.
In Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha a 10-year-old boy struggles to make sense of juvenile experience. Doyle doesn't try to tell us about the boy; rather, the boy tries to tell us himself in the only way he can. Similarly, The Woman Who Walked into Doors is another talking head. Perhaps you already get the point — this is a novel about domestic violence — the title is a dead giveaway. Nonetheless, while Paula Spencer habitually walks into her husband's fists, there's a story there which she is trying to tell us: "'They could smell the drink. Aah. They could see the bruises. Aah, now. They could see the bumps. Ah now, God love her. Their noses led them but their eyes wouldn't. My mother looked and saw nothing. My father saw nothing, and he loved what he didn't see ... The woman who walked into doors."
This work isn't about a violent thing as such; it is very much Paula Spencer's story as she recalls the contentment of her childhood, her abusive marriage and worsening drink problem. But she is trapped without any ready means to transcend her circumstances. Bitter and hurt but with three kids to look after, leaving doesn't come easily, and besides, "I stopped being a slut the minute Charlo Spencer started dancing with me". And she loved him.
Driven by modern cant such as "co-dependency" and similar shorthand, real domestic life so often scrubs up as sterile as a case history overseen by do-gooders. Such a neat presentation of the facts of the case is a long way from what Doyle has done here. Freedom is hard to come by and, judging victims for their inertia, achieves nothing for anyone. So there is no moralism here.
Instead, there is a voice which is horribly real, making a statement the only way she knows how. It is as though Roddy Doyle served as ghost writer, transcribing hours of intimate confessions of a woman who still lives somewhere in Dublin.
I don't know how he does it. He has an uncanny ear for language as it is spoken so that he culls it for what he wants, allowing the story to proceed without baggage. Unlike some of his predecessors in Irish fiction, so keen to make their wordy mark, Roddy Doyle can be read by anyone keen to explore an anguishing and mordant but riveting read.